Media Literacy Course Will Reach Public Schools across Armenia

A media literacy course in Armenia teaches students how to evaluate messages they see in the media with a critical eye. (credit: Multimedia Initiatives Center)

The media literacy curriculum created by Internews’ local Armenian partner, the Media Initiatives Center (MIC), was officially approved by the Armenian Ministry of Education for use in public schools across the country beginning with the 2013-2014 school year. This represents a major accomplishment for MIC, which has been working on the curriculum for more than a year.

The ten-lesson course teaches students how to evaluate messages they see in the media with a critical eye and introduces them to the basics of media production in a variety of formats, from print and online to TV and radio.

MIC created a textbook, audiovisual materials, and interactive activities to go along with the curriculum, and trained teachers to use the curriculum in their own classrooms through a series of trainings-of-trainers (TOT’s). While the media literacy course will not be a compulsory part of the national educational program, teachers may incorporate it into elective lessons or use it during after-school extracurricular clubs.

Late last year, MIC piloted the media literacy course with 10th and 11th grade students at Ayb School, an experimental private high school in Yerevan. Ayb teachers who had passed MIC’s TOT then applied for a grant from another Internews partner organization, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, to hold four of their own week-long media summer schools for 60 Armenian high school students from outside the capital in August. Participating students learned the basics of media literacy, practiced shooting and editing film, and produced their own short video stories over the course of the week.

MIC recently announced a competition for pilot media literacy training projects to be led by trained teachers at Armenian schools. They will support the most promising ones this autumn. The MIC team is currently working on an online game that helps users test their knowledge of media literacy concepts.